How to reverse a pipe in a savegame?

[Sharpy]

It seems my save somehow got corrupted.

I have this lander that uses four engines attached to four tiny tanks stuck radially around a large central tank. The fuel from the central tank is fed to these small tanks using the crossfeed tubes. It's been all done using 4x symmetry, and it worked fine until earlier yesterday.

Then it seems one of the pipes somehow switched orientation. Now one of the tiny tanks gets drained extremely fast as soon as I start the engines (and its engine dies), and meanwhile the three other engines don't pull fuel out of their own tanks or the central one.

The craft is a little too far to just go to VAB and send another one. I need to fix it by editing the save. How can I go about it?

Edited July 13, 2015 by Sharpy

[Xannari Ferrows]

I think you're just gonna have to edit up a new ship. Since a fuel line is a compound part rather than structured, this would be a really hard thing to do and would take a long time. It'd also run the risk of further damaging other parts.

[micr0wave]

If you're not against installing mods, you could try TAC Fuel Balancer, it has the option to balance all tanks, could avoid uneven drain with it.

[Claw]

Also, if you are willing to edit save files, you could send a fixed version of your probe to the launch pad then do a quicksave. (Keep a backup in case something goes wrong.)

Edit the save file with a plain text editor (like notepad) and find the old probe. Copy the vessel header info that contains the situation Orbit info. Copy that info into the new probe's header. Then, copy the new probe's lat/long/alt info to the old probe.

For both probes, you'll also need swap the state info (I forget the name of the variable off hand), but on the new probe, it'll be set to PRELAUNCH. You might also have to set the old probe's "Landed = True" variable. After you swap that, save the file and ALT+F9 load it. This should effectively swap the two vessels, and you can recover the broken one.

Cheers,

-Claw